


One Long Slide

by cnroth



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Divorce, Drug Use, F/M, Substance Use Disorder, alcohol use, doesn’t technically contradict Picard novel, hopelessness, parent with a substance use disorder, rated for subject matter and language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24055636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cnroth/pseuds/cnroth
Summary: “I lost my security clearance. I lost…”What happened to Raffi after Picard resigned from Starfleet? Beware: This is not a happy story.
Relationships: Raffi Musiker/Jae Hwang
Comments: 15
Kudos: 12
Collections: Caught The Darkness (Star Trek Fandom Event - May 2020)





	One Long Slide

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2020 Leonard Cohen x Star Trek fest. Note the tags before you dive in. Many thanks to Curator for her always-amazing beta work.

_Everybody knows that the dice are loaded_   
_Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed_   
_Everybody knows the war is over_   
_Everybody knows the good guys lost_   
_Everybody knows the fight was fixed_   
_The poor stay poor, the rich get rich_   
_That’s how it goes_   
_Everybody knows_

_—Leonard Cohen_

* * *

Lampposts and neon-colored signs line the streets of San Francisco, illuminating the night. Beautiful people in shimmering clothes make their way up and down the sidewalks in pairs or groups, joy etched into their laughing faces.

Raffi feels no joy. She wears no shimmering clothes, no glitter in her hair, no laughter on her lips. Where others stumble with pleasant intoxication from one bar or club to the next, Raffi stumbles aimlessly, half-empty bottle of Saurian brandy in hand, despair threatening to swallow her whole.

How the hell did everything go so wrong? Sure, there were a few missteps along the way, but _this_?

Okay, so maybe there were more than just a few missteps. 

If she really wanted to trace it back to the beginning, it was her first semester at the academy when she realized with painful clarity how high the academic standards were. She’d been valedictorian in high school, but somehow she was failing half of her academy classes. Only one thing saved her ass from failure.

Snakeleaf.

Popular among cadets, snakeleaf was supposed to increase focus and productivity. Some said it made you smarter, but really it just amped up cognitive functions and boosted mood.

Well, it worked. Raffi’s grades jumped. She excelled. Truthfully, she didn’t need it once she’d adjusted to the academy. It just felt good to be on top of her game all the time, and it made the stressful life of a Starfleet cadet much more bearable. 

What was the harm, anyway?

Professors sang her praises. She stayed at the top of her class through a double major, a masters degree, and advanced tactical training. She was smart. Always had been. Snakeleaf just helped her brain be more efficient with what it already had.

But it would come at a price.

Everything came at a price. There was always a trade-off. Always a gamble. Always profit and loss. Deep down, Raffi had known it all along. That was how the universe worked.

If only she’d accepted it sooner. Maybe then she would have stopped herself before she got in too deep. But that’s the thing about addiction, isn’t it? You never know you‘re in trouble until you‘re already drowning, and even then you try to rationalize your way out.

Excuses. Raffi has so many excuses. They seem valid, but are they really? She still doesn’t know.  
  


That mistake didn’t have to be the end of it, though. Despite her on-and-off-again use, she had a good career. Good enough that Starfleet was willing to overlook her problem and bend policy to keep her when she should have been discharged.  
  


No, it was decades later that everything really fell apart.

After the Mars attack, after JL resigned and fled to his pretty chateau with his tail between his legs, Raffi was sent back to her old post at Starfleet Intelligence. She’d been afraid the C-in-C would cut her loose, but in the end he’d just wanted to know her side of the story and confirm where her loyalties rested.

Unlike JL, she wasn’t about to give up.

For a while, she held herself together. She convinced her husband to let her come home despite years away on the Romulan relief mission, agreed to attend marriage counseling, and drank less. She resumed her work at headquarters.

But she couldn’t sleep. Every night when she laid down her head, her mind reeled with possible explanations for what was really behind the synth attack on Mars. 

Pestering her fellow intelligence officers about it only made them sick of her. Explaining her thoughts to the supervisor ultimately led to a reprimand for not focusing on her current assignment. She spent hours after shifts looking for evidence, staying late at the office until Jae demanded she come home, and using the occasional hit of snakeleaf to help her carry the extra workload. 

Soon her use was more than occasional. 

Okay, so she had relapsed, but she could control herself, and this mission… it was so much bigger than her, so very important. Maybe the most important mission of her life, despite the fact that it had officially ended over a year ago when the synths attacked Mars.

Except it wasn’t the synths—not of their own volition. It was the Tal Shiar. It had to be. If Raffi didn’t come up with solid proof soon, billions of Romulans would die.

What was a little snakeleaf compared to that, really? Besides, she would quit once this mess was straightened out and the relief mission resumed. No way was she going to return to Romulan space with any drug other than caffeine in her body.

When her habit was found out, she was given two options—discharge or rehab. Of course, she chose rehab. It wasn’t her first time. She’d gone once after the Dominion War, and again when an out-of-nowhere depression led to relapse. She knew the drill. 

Like everything, she threw her whole self into it.

“I swear, Jae,” she told her husband when she was released. “I’m staying clean. No more putting work before you and Gabe. I’ll keep it together.”

Dark eyes stared back at her, full of pain. Still, he nodded. “Alright, Raff. One more chance. Prove to me you mean it.”

“I will,” she said, eyes filling with tears as the weight lifted from her chest. She squeezed his hand, afraid that if she didn’t hold on tight he would slip away forever. “I promise you, I’ll do better this time.”

She made the same promise to her supervisor two days later, and she meant every word. Duty was everything to her. Federation ideals were everything. JL might have given up, but there was still time. Still time for the Romulans. Still time for Starfleet. Still time for hope.

Instead of staying late at the office every night, she went in early, and she ate lunch at her desk while she worked on her side project. True to her word, she spent her evenings at home, but any extra time she could find was devoted to research on Tal Shiar and Federation activity leading up to Mars. 

Ten weeks after that, Raffi found what she’d been looking for, albeit in an unexpected place—actual proof that someone high up in Starfleet had known there was a plan to attack Utopia Planetia and chose to do nothing. She would have taken it to her supervisor, but Raffi had had no desire to be reprimanded again for her so-called “conspiracy theory.”

So she called Picard instead.

“I found something, JL,” she said as his haunted eyes stared back at her through the holo-image. “Proof that Mars was planned. It has to be the Tal Shiar.”

He scoffed and shook his head. “Raffi, we’ve been through this already. There are no secret Romulan-Federation connections to Mars.”

“Yes, there are!” she nearly shouted, then glanced quickly at the door to her office. Jesus. She needed to keep quiet. If someone overheard…

“There is no reason for Romulans to destroy a fleet built expressly to rescue them.” His gaze turned sad. “You need to let it go.”

“What, like you did? Just give up on everything?”

JL’s expression hardened. “You cannot possibly understand.”

“Oh, I understand just fine,” Raffi narrowed her eyes. “You and your goddamn ego. You thought the whole fleet would bend to your will, and when it turned out you were wrong, you quit.”

He sighed.

“Well I don’t give flying fuck about your ego,” she continued, eighteen months of built-up hurt and rage adding fuel to her fire. “Lives are at stake here. Billions of them. You need to come back, JL. Leave the wounded pride in that fancy house of yours and get your ass over here where you can actually do some good.” She took a breath and forced out her quiet plea. “Please. I need you.”

“I’m sorry, Raffi,” he said, giving his head another shake. “It’s done.”

She ground her teeth to keep her lip from trembling. “You’re a goddamn coward, you know that?”

“Raffi—“

“Goodbye.” She slashed her hand through the air to close the comm channel, sure she’d severed the bond between them for good.

He never called her back.

Left to bear the burden alone, Raffi wrote a report explaining her suspicions and presenting the evidence she’d found. She sat on it for a few days. Tweaked it. Watched models of what would happen when the Romulan star went supernova, swallowing world after world, system after system. Finally, she screwed up her courage and went straight to the C-in-C. 

Her security clearance was revoked the next day. 

Still, she refused to give up. For months, Raffi chipped away at Starfleet and Federation firewalls, working her way into systems and databases she was no longer allowed access to. She honed her hacking skills, hoping like hell she could find more evidence—anything to connect Starfleet and Mars with the Tal Shiar. 

There was a coverup here, she was sure of it, and there were so many people still in the blast radius of the Romulan star. So many people to save. So little time.

It was all she could think about. She kept her head down at work, but the never-ending stream of thoughts came out at home. Every time she bounced ideas off of Jae, the annoyance in his voice grew. When she brought the topic up around Gabe, Jae shut her down on the spot. Soon it turned into arguments. Sleeping on the couch. Drinking.

Eventually, he filed for divorce and told her to leave.

She begged him for another chance. Swore she’d stop drinking. Even promised to leave the Mars theory behind her.

“You’re obsessed, Raff,” Jae said as they stood in the doorway to their house, packed bags at her feet. “You’ve made these promises to me and Gabe more times than I can count, and you fail us every time. You fail _him_ —your own son. He deserves stability, and you’re not stable.”

“Jae, baby, please don’t take him away from me,” she pleaded. “I won’t fail him again. I‘ll make it up to you both.”

Jae scoffed. “Bullshit. You can’t help yourself. First you abandoned us for a four-year mission. Now you’ve abandoned us for… what? Flushing out Romulan secret police so you can go back out there again? Do you realize how lonely I’ve been all this time? How much of Gabe’s life you’ve missed out on? Even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”

Raffi looked at her feet. “I know.”

“This conspiracy theory you keep rambling about—it’s paranoid and toxic. Frankly, it makes me wonder if you’re back on the leaf again—“

Her head snapped up. “No, I’m not—“

“—and I won’t let you poison our son anymore.” 

“I’m not,” she whispered. “Jae, please.”

He shook his head. “I can’t believe you anymore.”

Silence fell. The air seemed so thick. Raffi swallowed, trying to clear the lump in her throat. “Okay, then let’s talk about what kind of visitation schedule would work for—“

“No.”

She frowned. “No?”

“You’re not listening, Raff.” He sighed, and the look on his face spoke of bone-deep exhaustion. “I’ve requested forms for a restraining order. Please don’t make me file them. Just get in the cab and go. From here on out, we only talk through lawyers.”

Raffi stumbled back a step. “I’m his _mother_ , goddamnit! You can’t take him away from me.”

Jae’s tone was ruthless. “I can and I will.”

Tears stung her eyes. ”You can’t,” she said, voice cracking. “I’ll take you to court if I have to.”

“And you’ll lose.” He grabbed a large duffel bag from the floor and shoved it at her. “With a record like yours, you don’t stand a chance.”

Once during the Dominion War, not long after her maternity leave ended, Raffi was hit by phaser fire. A fight had broken out during negotiations between the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans. Raffi had stepped in to calm everyone down, but things came to blows anyway, and in the scuffle she was hit.

There was a moment, so brief it shouldn’t have registered yet it seemed to last forever, where she disconnected from reality and just… floated. Weightless. Tingling. Stuck between one breath and the next, suspended in time.

That was how it felt when Jae gave her what he’d clearly intended to be his parting shot. “ _With a record like yours, you don’t stand a chance._ ”

What did he mean? What record? What didn’t she stand a chance of? In the suspension, none of it computed.

Then the cracks inside her shattered.

She threw the duffel bag back at Jae and called him every vile name she could think of. In reply, he listed reason after reason why the actions he’d decided to take were necessary. It was a good thing, really, that Gabe had been at a friend’s house. A good thing he hadn’t witnessed it.

Still, she wished she could have said goodbye. But in the end, Jae had refused her even that.

Raffi was assigned a small apartment of her own, much closer to headquarters than her old home had been. It was there, in that apartment, on a boring, gray, standard-issue couch with the not-standard-issue snakeleaf plant she had smuggled in, that she saw the news. No one in Starfleet had bothered to tell her. Not even a comm from her supervisor to give a heads-up. Surely their sensor analysts had realized what the readings meant. The data must have been there.

Instead, Raffi had to find out along with the rest of everyone in two quadrants.

For as long as she lived, she would never forget that day. She’d been drinking, vaping, and mindlessly flipping through the holo-feeds when _it_ happened. Years of knowing it was coming could never have prepared her to actually see it play out. She watched in real time as the Romulan star exploded, split Romulus into pieces, and was swallowed by a black hole.

After that, she stopped showing up for duty. 

She’d devoted her whole life to Starfleet, had believed in it with every fiber of her being. Now that she was truant, it was only a matter of time before they discharged and evicted her. Every step she’d taken towards uncovering the Mars plot had led to disaster, and it cost her everything. 

Jae and Gabe. JL. The Romulan relief mission. Her career. All of it… gone. Now the Romulan Star Empire was fractured, its core planets burned to nothing, and what had been the point?

Nothing. The whole damn thing had been pointless. 

So there is no joy in Raffi’s heart as she wanders the neon-lit streets of San Francisco. She staked everything on proving her suspicions correct, and for what? What was she hoping to gain? The respect of her colleagues? JL in uniform again? Jae’s admiration, rather than his scorn, of her commitment to duty?

She wanted all of that—plus the billions of lives needlessly lost to Starfleet’s short-sightedness.

Yes, the stakes were high. Unspeakably high. She went all in on a game that was fixed by the Tal Shiar from the start.

And she lost.

**Author's Note:**

> If you’re struggling right now, there is always hope. Please reach out to a crisis hotline, mental health professional, and/or trusted friend or family member. You don’t have to live with negative thoughts and feelings, and you don’t have to deal with them alone.


End file.
